


The agent of Wind River

by letterando



Category: Wind River (2017)
Genre: Attempted Kidnapping, Crime Fighting, Crime Scenes, Crimes & Criminals, F/M, Gen, Kidnapping, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Serial Killers, Snippets, Threats of Rape/Non-Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 18:59:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13723983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letterando/pseuds/letterando
Summary: Three times FBI special agent Jane Banner was sent back to the Wind River basin.





	The agent of Wind River

**Author's Note:**

> Taylor Sheridan did a good job with his third script. He's also a good director. I hope he'll have a very productive career so I can enjoy many more great modern Western movies.
> 
> About the story: the ending is left open for your imagination to fill.  
> This work is un-beta-ed and self-edited, so please point out any typos you might find. I re-read my works three times before sharing them but accidental misses can always happen.
> 
> Have a good day y'all.

 

 

The first time Jane was sent back to the Wind River basin, she almost tripped over her words as she accepted her orders.

She felt stupid and pathetic, like a starving dog on a bone, but she didn’t care, her empty apartment was going to keep her secret.

She had no idea why she wanted to go back there, and for the first few days she saw the same expression echoed on the faces of everybody who’d ever heard of her. And since she became somewhat of a local oddity, everybody and their mother had heard of her.

She came back one year after her transfer from the hospital in Lander and everything seemed different and the same at the same time. Mostly because it was late spring and she couldn’t recognize the landscape she was facing.

She almost asked the new Sheriff where the hell did all that snow go, but fortunately avoided that particular brand of bad first impression.

She did ask Cory as soon as she saw him though, eliciting a rare smile and a chuckle.

Turned out, tracking without the snow was as difficult as tracking in the snow. The wildlife was much more active with the higher temperatures, and the tracks were more likely to get messed up by several sets of tracks, not to mention the near constant wind that rustled the undergrowth.

Cory seemed glad to see her again, although the distance of his son weighted on his mind.

It wasn’t until three days before they found the kidnapped child and almost shot the snatcher in the head that she her impression was confirmed.

They were having coffee in a local native’s house, and Mrs. Wolfrang asked after Cory’s dear Casey and what was the name of Wilma’s new man? Not that she didn’t appreciate Wilma choosing an Arapaho, but he seemed distant and she liked Cory better anyway.

Cory looked like he had just been beaten half to death with a baseball bat, but he smiled and said that his son was adjusting to Jackson Hole and that he was happy for Wilma.

Jane spent the remaining few days in the valley suppressing the urge to tell Cory that she was there for him, if he wanted.

.

.

.

The second time Jane was sent back to the reservation, she almost fought tooth and nail not to go.

She knew this assignment was a vacation slash punishment from her failure during the Columbia serial killer case, but they’d needed to catch him. So what if she went AWOL and let herself be apprehended and almost raped and left her superiors in chaos? She got the incriminating evidence. His DNA, prints, everything, she had collected them all on her body, protocol and orders be damned.

But she understood why she had been problematic, and why her superiors sent her to the Wind River basin in the middle of winter.

She’d thought the place was unforgiving in spring, but she hadn’t seen winter yet, said the Sheriff when she stepped onto the crime scene shaking all over, grinding her teeth to keep them from chattering.

Winter was a lazy season for Cory, who mostly patrolled the rez to look for lost tourists and young, stupid locals who participated or were roped into strange courage and endurance tests.

She was back one year and a half after the last time, and it was clear that Corry missed his son’s company almost as much as he grieved for his daughter.

Most of the Arapaho families knew Cory and his situation, and in the weeks Jane needed to discover that the kidnappings had been perpetrated by an animal trafficker turned human trafficker, she and Cory had been invited into the majority of the houses or trailers in the reservation.

Jane had started to research the natives’ culture out of curiosity after her first case in the valley, but now, seeing the smiles and nods of the elderly people gave her a rush of curiosity and excitement that made her blurt out questions whenever she went.

That same attitude was what had let her close in on the suspect, when she visited the local nursery home and ended up being schooled by most of the local ex-patriarchs and matriarchs.

For the two weeks she worked on the case, she also ended up bunking in with Cory. Half of the hostels full for a survival challenge and the other half was inaccessible due to the snow, so she didn’t really have a choice, but she was grateful nonetheless.

She lasted four nights on Cory’s couch, and when she popped her back so loudly one morning that Cory insisted she took the other half of the bed or he’d move her in the night.

One night she woke up with phantom hands pushing her down, tearing at her throat. She woke up breathless, blind, with one hand pressed on Cory’s carotid, and the other grasping for a gun that wasn’t there.

She squeezed her eyes and mumbled ‘fuck’ and mumbled apologies, while Cory let her go and quickly raised his legs from where they pinning down hers.

“At least you didn’t kick me where it doesn’t shine,” he said a few minutes later with a cup of hot cocoa in hand.

She took the cartoonish cup in her hands, but they were still shaking so much that she had to leave it on the bedside drawer for a minutes before she could pick it up again.

Cory, bless him, didn’t ask her anything, but talked about a type of pine tree in the rez that was so badass that it had fought a virus that had killed numerous acres of forest in Dakota.

She pressed her palm on the scar on her neck as he talked, reminding herself that she also was that strong, she had kicked death by blood loss in the gut, she had punched a serial killer and rapist in the jaw, and kicked him exactly where it doesn’t shine, and now she was back on her feet and ready to fight again.

So what if she was assaulted in her dreams? Many law enforcers faced worse horrors regularly and they were still out there, facing worse and worse horrors, screaming in their face ‘come and get me.’

She would catch the bastard trafficker and get the girls back home safe.

In the end, she was saved by Cory again, because the trafficker abducted her, but then he had to improvise and almost pushed her off a cliff.

She had never been happier to see a man’s knee shattered by a bullet when he raised his leg to stomp on her hands, desperately gripped onto a frozen branch.

When Cory reached to her, she was heaving herself up, and he pulled her into a one-armed hug.

There was no litany of reassurances or curses, but his shaking hold was more than enough to ground her and keep her out of the rising panic.

Because Cory didn’t speak, she didn’t have to reply and say that it was all okay, because after rolling off the man’s car while it was still running, she had to run up the mountain until the spot where they were now, and honestly, she had no intention of spew bullshit and say that it was all okay.

At that point, who cared about frostbite, she just hoped her lungs were okay. Her job was her life, she wasn’t going to get benched for a little climb, it’d been what, half a mile?

They left the Sheriff, a deputy, and a few local volunteers to fish the trafficker from the snowy cliff, and she fought a hysteric snicker when she woke up in the hospital in Lander again with Cory watching a Christmas movie on the age-old television.

The information she drilled from the trafficker turned out to be a fundamental part in a plot of organ traffickers by corrupts higher-ups of a ONG organization.

A few days later she was sent back to Vegas, where it was stupidly hot, what the hell, and where she received a module from the bureau which prompted her to choose a series of preferred places for her permanent station

She wrote Lander or Riverton, Wyoming, so fast that her first try was a scribble and she had to re-write it, taking a deep breath before each letter, and using all capitals to make sure everything was clearly legible.

.

.

.

The third time she was sent to the Wind River basin, it was the end of summer.

In the past two years she still heard nothing about a permanent station, and this time she was flanked by an unwilling agent who was being punished for reckless behavior during a snatch rescue op.

Fantastic.

Johnson had a short temper and a horrible patronizing and condescending tendency to put his hands on her to make his point, and Jane had no fucking idea what she was supposed to do with him other than ignore him half the time and leave him to his devices the other half.

He saw the corpse of a white guy and declared the culprit a native because the community was in the middle of a protest against a new gas tunnel under the reservation. And that was that, that was his investigation, apprehend the last native he’d been seen with and call it a day.

Alright, Jane silently conceded, the victim was the son of a local politician and the timing raised suspicions, but she remembered Cory’s words ‘You’re missing all the signs’ and left Johnson to investigate the white community while she browsed the reservation.

What little good impression she’d made the last time, it was wiped away by the homicide or forgotten.

After the seventh door slammed in her face she admitted defeat and called Cory for advice.

When they met up for lunch, he said nothing apart from asking her the addresses she was going to visit. He drove out while she used the loo of the diner and after the third family who bugrudginyl welcomed her, she finally gleaned on the fact that Cory was doing rounds in the rez and convincing people to talk to her.

She bristled in indignation at first. She’d only wanted some pointers about how to be accepted on her own, but she quickly pushed away her bitterness, and conceded that the help was necessary, and was increasingly grateful in each house and trailer she could get in.

Eventually, she caught up with Cory’s pickup and heard angry shouts from the inside of the old house. Her chest constricted with embarrassment at the thought of all the shit that Cory had taken from the natives as he tried to vouch for her, and she let herself in without waiting for somebody to open the door.

She ignored the outraged look of the elderly woman and the curious look of the girl at the kitchen table, and went straight towards the woman hammering away angrily in Arapaho at a tired-looking Cory, although that was his default expression now.

<<Please, let me help,>> she said in her broken Arapaho.

The little girl chuckled (most likely at her terrible pronunciation but excuse her, she didn’t have anybody to teach her), the grandmother, gasped, Cory looked at her with a knowing, rare tiny smile, but the woman started to shout at her half in Arapaho and half in English.

Only as Cory attempted to calm her down, she got the gist of the scolding. She, a white woman, had not only appropriated their language to incriminate innocent people, but had also insulted them by going around the rez, playing the good Samaritan so she could stab them all in the back.

“I just want justice to be done. Tyler had no love for your people, everybody in the rez knows that, but only the one or the people who killed him can help me see the whole picture. Anybody involved in the circumstances of Tyler’s death, I want them to respond for what they’ve done. No matter who they are.”

The silence that ensued was too deafening, so she went out to sit on the porch.

Paradoxically, after such a speech, she felt embarrassment. After all, she’d just barged into somebody’s home without so much as a by-your-leave. The grandmother and the girl came to sit with her though, and told her a terrible story.

Turned out the girl was best friend with a native girl involved with the victim. The victim had extorted pornographic material from this girl because of jealousy. Her white boyfriend and the girl’s brother and father had all collaborated to spook the boy enough to leave her be.

The rest was a jumbled puzzle of witness testimonies that led to manslaughter.

The Sheriff was too busy with keeping security in the anti-gas tunnel protests, so she tackled all the paperwork for the case. She wrote her reports holed up in Cory’s house as the first wave of snow storms hit the town just as she came down with a flu she picked up from a sick witness.

It had been the most miserable but simultaneously the most relaxing week of her life. Watching Cory make and tune his ammo was positively hypnotizing and more than once she fell asleep on the couch while staring at him work.

The was the first case in the valley when she didn’t have to trail behind Cory to find bloody clues in the snow or in the undergrowth, and both she and Cory parted ways proud of her and of her renewed good reputation in the rez.

“So you’re the agent of the Wind River valley now?” asked Cory as they parted ways in front of the small airport.

She felt a thrilling shiver down her spine at the moniker and played it as if a stray gush of icy wind had caught her by surprise.

“You wish,” she said instead, playing it cool.

But Cory smiled at her wistfully and extended his hand to shake hers.

He gripped her hand once, squeezing it lightly, and he let it go and then gripped her bicep next. He looked at her as if he couldn’t believe she was real.

‘I’m not letting you go,’ she wanted to say, but didn’t.

She reciprocated his grip though.

“Yeah, I wish,” he said, and let her go.

.

.

.

 

 

 


End file.
